Driving Up to Mount Cook

After a wonderful and too short time in Wellington, the next morning we boarded a plane to Queenstown.  Now, the whole time we had either been planning this trip, or even were just up on the north island, everyone kept asking 'Are you going to Queenstown?  Wait until you see Queenstown and the South Island'.  We were so enamored with the North Island we couldn't even imagine how the South Island could be any better.  I won't say it was better, because we really loved the North Island as well, but it was certainly different.

We got to Queenstown and immediately rented a car and headed up to Mt Cook, where I had booked a hotel and stargazing tour.  They are a certified Dark Sky area, so I was really excited about seeing basically every star in the galaxy.  It was about a four hour drive up there, and I wish I had more pictures of our first day drive, but I am notoriously terrible at taking pictures so I don't have many.  For the first hour or two of our trip, just imagine these huge poplar trees lining the fields that had turned this amazing hue of gold for the autumn there.  Now imagine that they are in the valley with us leading up to these beautiful mountains on each side and that most of your trip is cloudy, but that every so often the sun came out from behind the clouds and shone on the mountains, also gold, and basically turned the entire valley in to this glowing, golden, beautiful thing.  I need my sister the poet here to describe this better because it really deserves more perfect description than I am giving it, but just take my word for it.  To say it was breathtaking is not an overstatement.  In the picture below if you can see, there was even a rainbow at one point.

Once we got through the valley we started up the side of a mountain towards our hotel.  We are truly in the middle of nowhere and we come around this turn and there is this beautiful lake.  I looked it up and it is called Lake Pukaki and it was a beautiful clear blue color that is caused by being fed from glacial waters.  There was some photography tour there taking pictures so we stopped right along with them and took some of our own (with much less impressive cameras).  Again, this picture is nowhere near doing this lake justice, but it was incredible and there was nothing there is the amazing thing.  I am used to lakes that are brown and still jammed with people and boats and lake houses.  There was nothing on this lake.  Just serenity.

As we made it up towards our hotel we started to get rained on and this is another time we realized how weather dependent so many things in New Zealand are.  We had spent half a day driving up to this hotel just to do this stargazing tour, and as soon as we got to our room, they called to let us know it was cancelled due to the rain.  I had been really looking forward to that tour so I was bummed, but truly the scenery (and the snow we would see the next day on the way back...did that hook you to read my next post?) was worth the drive.  Here is a view from our hotel room.

The next day we got up to drive to Wanaka and spend a night there to break up the trip back down and around the mountains that lead up to the west coast and the glaciers.  The drive got interesting and Wanaka was great!  Stay tuned...